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Live-Tweeting the Apocalypse

Ian Creasey lives in Yorkshire, England. His short fiction has appeared regularly in Asimov's and elsewhere. In 2011 he published his debut collection, Maps of the Edge. His spare time interests include hiking, gardening, and environmental conservation work--anything to get him outdoors and away from the computer screen. More information can be found on his website at www.iancreasey.com.

I've written flash fiction before, but "Live-Tweeting the Apocalypse" was the first time I've written anything in Twitter format. The main challenge I faced was the tension between realism and readability. For instance, Twitter publishes the most recent tweets at the top of the screen, so a realistic rendition of the story would begin with the final tweet and work backward; however, I felt that this was perhaps asking too much of readers. Similarly, one critiquer of my first draft complained that the text was "a little too well-typed and well-phrased" for Twitter, to which I responded: "this is just an extension of the literary convention that dialogue is a tidier version of what would actually be said."
The idea for the story came to me while I was hiking in the moors somewhere north of Hebden Bridge. Normally I can offer some account of what inspired any particular idea, but in this case I can't. It just arrived without warning, out of nothing--rather like the end of the world itself, I suppose.